September 2026
Dr Sepideh Yekani
Dr. Sepi Yekani presented this work at the TWR 2026 conference, where it was examined in an academic context. Here, the findings have been translated into practical insights for anyone engaged in workplace management.
An increasing number of organisations are asking employees to spend more days in the office, and the reasoning is usually perceptive: bring people together, and collaboration, knowledge sharing and productivity will follow.
It sounds plausible. But is it what the data tells us?
We tested it.
Drawing on the Leesman database, we analysed 808 global office environments representing 377,086 employee responses, gathered between Q1 2022 to Q3 2025, as workplaces were reoccupied following the pandemic.
Across the sample, employees spent an average of 52% of their working time in the workplace, or roughly two and a half days in a five-day week.
We wanted to know whether spending more time in the workplace is associated with employees’ sense that their workplace enables them to work productively.
The answer is yes, but only to a point.
Presence matters, but only modestly
Time spent in the workplace is positively associated with employees’ sense that the workplace enables them to work productive. The relationship is statistically robust, but the effect is small.
Being there matters. It just isn’t the biggest lever.
Knowledge sharing is a much stronger signal
Workplaces that employees say support them sharing ideas or knowledge amongst colleagues score substantially higher on productivity enablement.
The association is roughly twice as strong as that of presence.
In other words, it is not simply being around colleagues that matters. It is whether the workplace helps people make the most of being around them.
Enjoyment is the strongest signal of all
The strongest association with productivity enablement in our model is whether employees say their workplaces create an enjoyable environment to work in.
The relationship is around three times stronger than that of presence. And importantly, enjoyment has no relationship with how much time employees spend there.
More days in the office do not make the office more enjoyable.
The gap between presence and knowledge sharing is perhaps the most revealing finding.
Being in the same building creates opportunities for interaction, but it does not guarantee them.
Hybrid working has changed the micro-dynamics of the workplace. Colleagues can be less visible to one another, ambient cues are thinner, and the effort involved in initiating a quick conversation can be greater. Attendance is also increasingly coordinated around teams, meaning that the value of a workplace can vary considerably depending on who is there and when.
A full office on Tuesday and a quiet one on Friday may have the same overall attendance figure, but they do not necessarily create the same opportunities for interaction.
The finding on enjoyment tells a similar story from another angle.
Employees who work in enjoyable environments report substantially higher productivity enablement, but they do not get there simply by spending more time in the workplace.
This is consistent with the principle of Person-Environment Fit: performance is more likely to emerge when the environment matches what employees and their work actually require.
Simply increasing exposure to a workplace does not improve the fit.
Attendance is not irrelevant. Our data shows a genuine, if modest, association between time spent in the workplace and employees’ sense that their workplace enables them (me) to work productively.
But of the three factors we tested, it is the weakest.
The two stronger signals are about the quality of the workplace: whether it supports knowledge sharing and whether people enjoy working there.
That changes the return-to-office conversation.
A mandate can increase attendance. It cannot, by itself, create better opportunities for knowledge sharing or make a workplace more enjoyable. Those things have to be measured, managed and designed.
Organisations focused only on filling desks may be pulling the smallest available lever, while creating unintended consequences when the workplace is not ready to support employees effectively. Asking people to give up some of the flexibility they have gained from hybrid working will not deliver better results if the workplace itself is not equipped to support what people need from it.
The priority, then, should be to understand employees’ needs and make sure the workplace is fit for purpose before focusing on increasing attendance.
